Let 'Em Eat Cake -- in Dubbo
Australia's Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, has offered us his wise thoughts on why it is not necessary - nay counter-productive - to increase Newstart, Australia's income support for the stubbornly high numbers of fellow Australians who are unemployed. It is unnecessary because there are plenty of jobs waiting to be filled -- just not where the unemployed are currently located. An increase is dangerous because it 'rewards' sloth, removing the harsh discipline of starvation as a goad to working. These are not the words coming out of the DPM's mouth, just the 'logic' underlying the implicit premises of his understanding.
The world he inhabits, materially and mentally, is so far removed from the real lived experiences of the large and diverse fragment of our society currently out of work that constructing a bridge between those two worlds is a hopeless task. All that I can offer is some thoughts on why the McCormack doctrine should be consigned to the outer reaches of serious political debate.
Where to start? Well, put yourself in the place of someone who has lost her job and been actively looking for a new one for the past few months. Let's call her 'Jenny'. She was 'let go' with a small severance payment from a bank whose new CEO came in with a plan to reduce costs -- sold as increasing efficiency and improving customer service. In spite of heroic domestic economies, that buffer has now been exhausted and she is now managing her daily living and that of her family on the Newstart allowance, while fully complying with Centrelink's requirements to actively pursue employment. This latter includes compiling and submitting the minimum number of new job applications every month. She has long ago given up hope of securing a job in the service sector for which her qualifications and experience would fit her, and has spread her search far and wide, both with respect to job level - downward -- and locale. But she is fifty-three and a 'she'. No offer of an interview has transpired for weeks, other than one on the other side of the city that would involve a daily commute of more than three hours.
What's the problem? Why doesn't she move to the other side of town? Well, she can't. Her husband is on a disability pension and unable to work. His condition requires daily medication that even with the help of Australia's generous subsidised pharmaceuticals scheme, exhausts most of his income support. (He is more than ten years away from qualifying for a Commonwealth Health Card.) Jenny no longer receives family benefits as her children are too old. The eldest has developed a drug problem and requires special help and daily assistance by her. Rent on the other side of town is twice that where she now lives in a modest house that she and her husband bought on a joint mortgage. The mortgage is falling into arrears and her credit card is maxed out. She has begun to visit the local food bank. And so on.
Jenny's story is only one of eight million in the naked city. (For any reader under sixty, that is a reference to a popular American television show of the 1950s and 60s.) Think about someone you know, a friend, or friend of a friend, or a son or daughter of a friend. Are they in a situation like Jenny's? Could they up and move, even if they wanted to? Involuntary unemployment is experienced as an individual fate, but it is a socially constructed reality. Macroeconomic forces beyond the control of workers, employers and governments largely determine the overall numbers and trends in unemployment, especially in small open economies like Australia. Structural changes driven by technology and corporate organisation over determine these outcomes and impose both temporal and geographical rhythms on the dance. The Jennys of the world are the ones left sitting like wallflowers watching and waiting for the chance to step out. God help them because Mr. McCormack won't.
Getting real requires a determination to look closely at why unemployment is a serious and pervasive blight on an otherwise affluent society like Australia. Unlike many other countries, the Australian economy has grown in material terms -- that is as measured by per capita GDP -- for more that two decades. But averages hide the wide disparities in the beneficiaries of growth. It is a commonplace in domestic political debate that wages have stagnated while asset markets boomed, tilting the pre-distribution of income and accumulated wealth increasingly in favour of the well off. Neoliberal policies of privatisation and deregulation have fed these developments. Taxation 'reform' -- read cuts -- has parlayed increasing inequality to post-tax distribution. Developments in superannuation savings have also reinforced the pronounced trend to wealth polarisation. (I will have more to say on super in a future post.) Looked at through this lens, unemployment is structural not 'voluntary', a 'social fact' in Durkheimian terms, like suicide. As such it calls for social not individual solutions, and certainly not the boiler plate, knee-jerking of coalition politicians, personally comfortable on their parliamentary salaries. (I partly exempt McCormack's predecessor Barnaby Joyce here, given his well-advertised struggles to keep two families humming at the same time.)
What the flights of fancy of coalition pollies display is a breathtaking lack of compassion for the most vulnerable people in our marketized society. If you don't have and can't get a job, you don't have income, other than that supplied by the community of which you are a part by the government you collectively elect. If you don't have income, you can't participate in the market for the goods and services you need to survive. Friends, family, local charities and the like can help for a time. But in the end, you are by yourself and, like Jenny, increasingly desperate. It is tempting to think that the coalition's stance here is the result of ignorance and a stubborn unwillingness to face facts. But as attractive as this reading is, especially for some politicians -- McCormack comes irresistibly to mind -- this is to deny the self-serving functions that such a worldview supports. Follow the money, always a useful guide when unravelling complex political-economic questions. Stagnant wages, supported by a permanent underclass of unemployed job-seekers, underpins and grows the wealth and power of privileged classes. That growing power -- including the capacity to steer government policy -- reinforces the machine that grows increasing wealth disparities in a congenial positive feedback loop -- congenial for the well off, that is.
But it's important to grasp that the tropes trotted out by political and commercial elites -- aspiration, trickle-down, incentivisation, etc. -- have a real, material basis in the increasing class fragmentation of Australian society. Technology-driven changes in labour markets and the rise of the digital economy is radically unequalising life chances. Although the lion's share of growth is being captured as unearned income and economic rents by the top one per cent and their hanger's on, a plausible story can be told that you too can aspire to and if you are talented and hard-working enough, achieve entry to the club. Those who manage against all odds to do so are like Tattslotto winners; someone has to win but everyone else doesn't. All this seems fair to most Australians. We all know of people we think are bludging, not doing their bit, not trying, becoming a burden on the rest of us. We are not like that. By our own efforts and character, we are contributing.
Notions of fairness and desert cut deep into our human psyche. We instinctively compare ourselves to others close by in socioeconomic and geographic terms. Social justice, in the words of one sociologist, is matter of relative deprivation. We feel unjustly deprived if we are not treated as well in life as someone else, who we think inferior in merit, but receives more than us. We don't get to see much of those at the top of the pile -- they work in large towers and live in affluent enclaves -- just those near us. This is helpful to those wishing to stoke divisions, by exhorting us to aspire to rise, not join with others like us to collectively demand fairer rules and outcomes. But even more useful to elites is the corollary; if you don't aspire, you will fall back among the losers. This not only shores up the real privileges and power of those elites, it also reduces awareness of and concern for the plight of the less fortunate Jennys of our community. When you are scrambling to get on a lifeboat, there is little time to look around for others in the water. It might even be a good idea to ignore the faint cries for help behind you.
This idea was satirised in the 1950s by another British sociologist in a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, which purported, tongue in cheek, to be able to quantify merit as equal to IQ plus Effort. Merit would become the automatic process by which people were allocated -- as if by an invisible hand -- to their rightful (i.e. deserved) places in society. The book was meant as a satire on the idea of the affluent worker thesis popular in the 1950s, but conservatives and liberals everywhere grabbed it to prop up their fairy-tale of the end of class differences in modern capitalist societies. It has more recently been re-launched in the guise of 'the aspirational society'.
Michael McCormack is no doubt unaware of the lineage of his social prognosis and prescription. It simply suits his immediate political purpose -- and that of the Treasurer -- to bat away the increasingly loud calls for the Morison government to increase the pittance doled out to the unemployed. He has, however, publicly advertised, in an admittedly crude and clueless manner, the social philosophy undergirding the current Australian government's social policy agenda. Let 'em eat cake. If only he and his colleagues were to share the French Queen's fate.
PS. It appears that Mr. McCormick's solution can be extended to citizens of the sinking Pacific who will be able to escape the rising sea by flying in to pick fruit -- in Dubbo, presumably. This merely underscores the complete lack of a spatial imagination ( not to forget cultural insensitivity) of the current federal government which has no conception of the spatial division of labour and (close to home) the current disconnect between jobs and housing in our major metropolitan regions. Vague 'plans' to 'bust congestion' won't wash.